A Little Levity from The New Yorker

ADDICTION: Disease or Deadly (but curable) Habit?

In this article from Salon.com, Laura Miller discusses the evolving view of addiction. She quotes psychologist Marc Lewis, from his book “The Biology of Desire”: “Addicts aren’t diseased,” Lewis writes, “and they don’t need medical intervention in order to change their lives. What they need is sensitive, intelligent social scaffolding to hold the pieces of their imagined future in place — while they reach toward it.”

Are You Emotionally Healthy?

Here is beautifully written and important piece by Alison Crosthwait in which she addresses the question of what constitutes emotional health – a concept that is too often reduced to snap judgments, assumptions and sometimes damning assessments of ourselves and others. In fact, “emotional health” is a deep and multi-faceted state of being, existing on a continuum.

When Boundaries Create Freedom

In this prosaic piece from the New Yorker, Esther Sperber considers the nature of the ‘therapeutic frame’ and the way in which it creates the freedom necessary to explore our simplest and most complex feelings:

“Why am I sharing this small story? Perhaps because I love that psychoanalysis is a frame through which I have permission to pay close attention to peripheral vision, to things that are out of focus and not so conscious. Enigmatic dreams, childhood memories and mourning are all welcome, and they open me to my own feelings and to a wider range of human experiences.”